Friday, February 8, 2013

Don’t tell the feminists but women are physically weaker
than men. And don’t tell the feminists that forcing everyone to qualify the
word "woman" with the word "strong" over and over again does not enhance
anyone’s physical strength.

It makes you look like you have taken leave of your rational faculties.

Nowadays good feminists are looking in their mirrors
and solemnly intoning: Who is the strongest of them all? At the same time, they are filling their
conversations with apologies. For all the apologizing you would think that
liberated women are a sorry bunch indeed.

At some level, all of those apologies are adaptive behavior.
Being the weaker and the fairer sex women want to avoid conflict. Apologizing
is a way of avoiding conflict. Thus, women are prone to do it more often. It’s
a survival mechanism. Darwin would have had no problem explaining it.

All of this assumes that we have a basic understanding of
the social ritual called apology. Saying you are sorry may be an apology, but
it may not be. It’s a murky area, indeed.

Writing in JezebelKaryn Polewaczyk suggests that women apologize too much, and that if they want
to be good feminists they should stop being so weak.

In her words:

While it’s easy to chart the number of times
someone apologized during a scientifically-controlled study, I don’t think
women are genetically programmed to act like this, or that men have a “higher
threshold” for offensive behavior. I think it’s that women are expected to be
exceptionally grateful for the crumbs tossed our way—and so we show our
gratitude by cushioning our wants with a series of, “I know this is asking a
lot, but…”, “I hate to ask, but could you…” and “I might sound like an idiot
for wondering, but…”-isms.

As a rule feminists do not
believe that women or men are genetically programmed to behave one way or
another. But Polewaczyk’s errs when she compares apology to expressions of
gratitude.

For the record, when you
apologize you taking personal responsibility for having offended,
slighted, failed or otherwise committed an error. By doing so you are saying
that the mistake was inadvertent, that you swear not to do it again and that
you will humbly withdraw from human commerce in order to make amends.

Apologies are usually divided
into sincere and insincere. If the apologetic individual does not look like he
is suffering severe moral anguish then the chances are that he does not mean
what he is saying and will go back to making the same errors at the earliest
opportunity.

If someone looks like he is
apologizing sincerely and fails to honor his implied vow not to do it again,
his apology is insincere.

If someone looks like he is
apologizing sincerely and does not feel that he needs to withdraw for a time
from human society then his apology is insincere.

If Polewaczyk is saying that some
people apologize so often that their apologies cannot be sincere she has a
point. Apology can be constructive, but just as it is possible to
have too little of a good thing it is also possible to have too much.

If her friends apologize too
often with too much feeling for small things, they are not really being
sincere. A friend who is sorry for everything is sorry for nothing. She will break another
appointment in a heartbeat if she finds that keeping it is inconvenient.

People who keep apologizing have
obviously missed the point: if they had kept their word and shown themselves to
be trustworthy they would not have had to keep apologizing.

As for the pre-apology that many
women seem to use as a preface when asking for something, it seems to annoy those who believe in mindless self-assertiveness.

In truth, it’s a rhetorical ploy.
It might be overused, but that does not make it a bad thing.

When a woman says that she is sorry
to have to ask for something she is saying that you should have offered it without her having to ask for it. Such an apology is
face-saving; it saves the other person’s face. Count it as a sophisticated
social skill, one that is designed to make it appear that she is not accusing
the other person of anything.

When you use it effectively, the
person of whom the request was made ought to express some degree of contrition
for having put you in the position of having had to ask for it.

At the least we should understand
that apologizing for breaking an appointment is not the same as pre-apologizing
before asking the waiter to fill your glass of water.

Emily Esfahani Smith, an author I
admire greatly, addressed the issue yesterday and managed to confuse it even
more.

Like Polewaczyk she confuses gratitude
with apology. Receiving a gift puts you in someone’s debt. If you fail to
express gratitude you are an ingrate and a taker.

But gratitude does not express
vulnerability. It represents an acknowledgement of your connection with the
giver. It places you within a transaction where no one has done anything
wrong.

When apology is at issue, someone
has done something grievously wrong. The distinction is not immaterial.

No sensible person has ever
imagined that gratitude is a sign of weakness. No sensible person has ever
imagined that an apology is anything other than a sign of vulnerability, of
self-abasement.

Allow Smith to express her view:

To admit that you did something wrong and feel
bad about it also makes yourself completely vulnerable, vulnerable to the other
person and his judgement of you. Will he forgive you? Or will he not? But for
exactly these reasons, saying sorry is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of
strength. Apologizing is hard and you have to be pretty secure about who you
are to put yourself out there like that. Apologizing requires courage. So does,
by the way, saying thank you.

Between us, vulnerability is not
a strength. Also, anyone can say they are sorry, many people utter the empty
words every day, that is the point of the discussion. Strength enters the
picture when the person who has committed the fault corrects his or her behavior.

It takes no courage to say thank
you. It takes discipline and decorum to say thank you, but you are not showing courage when you write a thank you
note. An apology is designed to correct an error and to repair a relationship. When you send a thank you not you are reciprocating good behavior.

When you apologize, Smith says, you are
allowing yourself to be judged. True enough. But still, when someone apologizes to you, you are obligated to forgive him.
If you are in doubt about his sincerity you are still obligated to forgive him. If,
however, he has apologized for the same fault over and over again and has not
changed his behavior, you need not forgive him.

It is true, as Smith says, that
an individual who apologizes is working to repair a relationship that she has
damaged. But, an apology followed by forgiveness does not repair the
relationship.

When you commit a fault,
apologize and receive forgiveness you are on probation. The relationship will
not be fully repaired until you establish a pattern of consistently ethical
behavior, to the point where the fault you committed is clearly not indicative
of your character or of the esteem you hold for the other person.

Being able to apologize and show gratitude are both signs of character. It should not be hard to understand why feminists don't seem to like attributes that might demonstrate character.It would seem to me that the people who are actually waging war on women are feminists. This obsessive desire to control women is truly dangerous.Most women are good people just trying to live their lives to the fullest. Is it any wonder that feminism is increasingly isolated to failed "blue model" areas.One wonders how degraded by feminism women have to become before women have finally had enough?